'Hey, It Will Only Cost $7 Billion To Build A Storm Surge Barrier For New York - Whaddya Say?'

'Hey, It Will Only Cost $7 Billion To Build A Storm Surge Barrier For New York - Whaddya Say?'
Mon 8:14 am

'Hey, It Will Only Cost $7 Billion To Build A Storm Surge Barrier For New York - Whaddya Say?' - My thanks to a reader for this topical article by Henry Blodget (would you believe?) and Rob Wile for Business Insider. Here is the opening, written in New Yorkese:

One of the tragedies of our budget crisis is that the amount we spend on on stuff that helps everyone - infrastructure - continues to decline to make room for our ballooning entitlement spending.

And the deficit has become so politicized that any time anyone proposes spending a bit more on infrastructure - and putting more Americans back to work in the process - members of one of our two political teams freak out.

~snip~

To put that $7 billion in perspective, its significantly less than the $12 billion price tag on one of our new aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Gerald Ford.

unhappycamper comment: Just cancel one Virginia-class submarine (~$7 billion) and that Storm Surge Barrier is paid for. Cancel the USS Gerald R. Ford and you will not incur $30 ~ $40 billion dollars on the credit card. Get out of Afghanistan and you will not incur $100 billion dollars a year on the credit card. Cancel the F-35 program and you will not incur $1.5 trillion dollars of debt.

There's plenty of money out there; it's just being spent in all the wrong places.

1. Natural barriers

I saw some pics today with natural barriers like they do in the Netherlands. They are beautiful and effective. Of course, they didn't take into consideration the very extreme climate we now have when they were built.

Expectations is that by the time the glaciers are done melting, New York will be permanently under water -- so will most of the coast towns.

2. Save New York, end the war. :)

3. After the Great Storm hit Galveston....

and almost wiping it out, the wise city fathers built the storm wall. It has proved it's value time and time again. Most people don't realize it but Galveston Island rivaled Ellis as a starting point for immigrants to America. I think it is worth the price, but then I am a liberal Democrat.

To prevent future storms from causing destruction like that of the 1900 hurricane, many improvements to the island were made. The first 3 miles (4.8 km) of the 17-foot (5 m) high Galveston Seawall was built beginning in 1902 under the direction of Henry Martyn Robert. An all-weather bridge was constructed to the mainland to replace the ones destroyed in the storm.

The most dramatic effort to protect the city was its raising. Dredged sand was used to raise the city of Galveston by as much as 17 feet (5.2 m) above its previous elevation. Over 2,100 buildings were raised in the process, including the 3,000-ton St. Patrick's Church. The seawall and raising of the island were jointly named a National Historical Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2001.

In 1915, a storm similar in strength and track to the 1900 hurricane struck Galveston. The 1915 storm brought a 12 ft (4 m) storm surge which tested the new seawall. Although 53 people on Galveston Island lost their lives in the 1915 storm, this was a great reduction from the thousands who died in 1900.

The Galveston city government was reorganized into a commission government, a newly devised structure wherein the government is made of a small group of commissioners, each responsible for one aspect of governance. This was prompted by fears that the existing city council would be unable to handle the problem of rebuilding the city.